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Reblogged because today February 15th is the birthday of this amazing heroine of Poland’s Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. Never forget! Never Again!

“Ms. Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers.”

Remember THIS WOMAN

Look at this woman – Let us never forget!

The world hasn’t just become wicked…it’s always been wicked. The prize doesn’t always go to the most deserving.

Irena Sendler Died 12 May 2008 (aged 98) Warsaw , Poland During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’. She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews (being German). Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger children). She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the infants’ noises. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those children she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted. Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. President Obama won…………….

According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. {What do you think? Has he brought peace or division? Al Gore won also…trumped the more than 3,000 lives saved by this woman when you include the adults she also saved and not mentioned here}……………………

In MEMORIAM – 63 YEARS LATER……. in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!

Now, more than ever, with Iran , and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be ‘a myth’. It’s imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

LOS ANGELES – Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose ingenuity and daring saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination in the Holocaust, a feat that went largely unrecognized for 60 years, died yesterday in Warsaw. She was 98.

She had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia, according to Pawel Maciag, a spokesman for the Polish embassy in Washington.

Ms. Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. But unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie “Schindler’s List,” Ms. Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.

“One person can make a difference,” Megan Felt, one of the students who wrote the play, said yesterday of Ms. Sendler.

“Irena wasn’t even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well,” said Felt, who now helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.

Ms. Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child whose parents raised her to care about those in need. “I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not,” she told the British newspaper Express in 2005. She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Ms. Sendler was 9.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of Warsaw, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Ms. Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a sanitary worker, allowed to bring in food, clothes, and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis became clear, Ms. Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota, recruited 10 of her closest friends and began rescuing Jewish children.

They smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to prevent their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages.

Decades later, Ms. Sendler was still haunted by the parents’ pleas, particularly those from families who ultimately could not bear to part from their children.

“The one question every parent asked me was, ‘Can you guarantee they will live?’ We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee was that the children would most likely die if they stayed.”

Most of the children who left with Ms. Sendler’s group were taken into Catholic convents, orphanages, and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. In the hope that she could reunite them with their families later, Ms. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden.

She was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. With her name on a list of executed prisoners, Ms. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Ms. Sendler had begun her rescue efforts before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. “We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Ms. Sendler ultimately helped rescue some 3,000 Polish Jews. Read more here

Critics point to a variety of new local organizations that are springing up to apparently take ACORN’s place. In Brooklyn, New York the ACORN office now has a new sign: “New York Communities for Change,” and in Massachusetts the president of the new group, “New England United for Justice” is listed as Maude Hurd, the president of ACORN, in its articles of Organization.

There are a growing number of such local groups replacing ACORN, according to Matthew Vadum, of the Capital Research Center. He says ACORN Housing has changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, Inc., and that other ACORN connected groups include: Arkansas Community Organizations, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and Missourians Organizing for Reform Empowerment.

“This is a trick, a public relations trick,” says Vadum, calling the move an attempt “to dupe Congress and the American people to think they have gone away and they have not.” He says “the same people are running the new chapters that have sprung up and in some cases, out of the same offices.”